


a medicinal haunting

by a_good_soldier



Series: s13 codas [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s13e10 Wayward Sisters, F/F, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-19
Updated: 2018-01-19
Packaged: 2019-03-06 18:15:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13416852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_good_soldier/pseuds/a_good_soldier
Summary: Claire is in mourning.





	a medicinal haunting

It’s boring to keep a journal about your grief. Boring and, as Claire finds out soon enough, time-consuming. She loses track after three days, and it isn’t helped by the fact that she’s slept through more afternoons than she can count. It’s been a week— two weeks? It’s been some time.

Claire listens to music on the treadmill. She doesn’t run outside anymore. It doesn’t seem right to be in the sunlight, when Kaia’s—

“I wish—” she hiccups once, when Jody spoons mashed potatoes onto her plate, the space in the empty chair next to her somehow more present than any of the people around this table. Her throat clicks and her voice dries up. “I—”

Alex looks at her with pity as she blinks, blinks and blinks; it’s hard to find a mascara that’ll keep up with Claire’s tear ducts these days.

* * *

Claire has recently learned to be angry about three things:

  1. Homophobia
  2. Grief
  3. Dead fucking lesbians



She writes those down in her journal, and then feels like an idiot and rips the page out. They haunt her, though, those words. What must it feel like to realize you loved something only when you lost it? What kind of hurt is that, when you don’t even recognize it until after it’s happened?

She knows, of course. She knows.

* * *

Her journal has taken on a life of its own. Once, she began to sketch the eyes, the hooded, sprawling tattered silhouette of those monsters; she scribbled and pressed and got a bright red pen for the eyes, and when she was done she couldn’t look at the page. She got Patience to rip it out and burn it for her. Seems like she’s losing more pages than writing in them.

Claire counts the days. She didn’t keep track of the date, but Alex has a fucking Google calendar, and Claire asks her to figure out when they went out to that empty shipyard, full of ghosts and dying boats. She counts the days off on a piece of paper.

Day 32: I’m Not Fucking Crazy, she writes, and then crosses the whole line out. She resists the urge to tear out this page, too; it’s time she stopped running away.

Day 32, she writes, under her aborted first attempt, since it’s hard to argue with incontrovertible fact. It has been thirty-two days since Kaia died. She writes that down, too.

She writes, I want to go for a run, and puts her pen down.

Claire puts on a sports bra and shorts, and heads for the basement treadmill. Claire listens to music on the treadmill. Stuff Kaia seemed to like, in the few moments next to the car before it all went to shit. She liked Queen Adreena and A Tribe Called Red and IAMX, and Gordon Lightfoot and Emmylou Harris and John Denver. “It all makes me feel _here_ ,” Kaia had said.

She gets a cramp in her stomach and slows to a walk before she pukes all over Jody’s nice clean floor.

* * *

Alex’s coworkers have started to make fun of Claire for hanging around all the time. They start to tease her, asking what she’s after, asking what she gets out of being at the hospital at two in the morning.

Alex won’t look her in the eyes. Claire pretends she’s not there to keep watch.

“You can have your own hobbies, you know,” Alex says in Claire’s car, because this has been going on for long enough that Alex has admitted defeat and let Claire drive her to work. “You don’t just have to tag along with me to work every night.”

“Uh huh,” Claire says, and turns up “Shallow Grave.” She doesn’t even like the Steeldrivers.

Alex hits the power button to turn the music off. “Claire,” she says, very seriously, and very softly, “come on.”

“What?” Claire even turns to look at her, risking a dead hour highway collision just to give Alex the honesty she’s owed. “What is it?”

“Do you even like country?” When Claire doesn’t say anything, Alex adds, “I feel like— I feel like I used to know more about you, and you didn’t even live at home. What kind of music do you like? What do you enjoy doing? Where do you go when no one else is around?”

Claire swallows. The answers to Alex’s questions are I don’t know, I don’t care, and nowhere. It’s too late — or too early — for those kinds of answers.

They pull into the garage. Claire stumbles up to bed and lets Alex hog the bathroom.

Day 36, she writes, right under where she’d written _I want to go for a run_ four days ago. 

She taps her pen against the paper. Day 36. She adds, I don’t like any music anymore. I don’t like doing anything anymore. I don’t hunt alone because Jody will worry. I don’t hunt with other people because I can’t get anyone else killed.

That’s enough for tonight.

* * *

“Been a good long while since I’ve had a nice picnic, girlies,” Donna says, either hamming up the accent or maybe she really just talks like that. Claire’s having a hard time figuring it out. She’s always a little out of sync with the rest of them, as much as they’re the only family she has left.

Anyway, they go on the picnic, which Donna must have suggested to Jody before she arrived or something, because they have sandwiches and blankets ready. It’s two in the afternoon on a Sunday; perfect picnic time. It’s still cold, too cold, maybe, but they all have warm coats and it’s going to be more of a hike-and-lunch than a picnic, as it turns out.

The sun is outside. Claire is inside. Claire realizes, belatedly, that it has been a while since she’s been out during the day.

“Uh,” she starts. Jody looks at her. She says, “I— Maybe you should…”

She doesn’t finish saying _go on without me_ , because Patience is nodding, like she totally agrees with whatever Claire has left unspoken. “Yeah,” Patience says, with an air of common sense, “we should totally pack the wireless speakers! I didn’t even think of that.”

Claire shuts her mouth. It’s obvious, it’s pathetically obvious, but no one seems inclined to break the spell. Patience has said it, and so it must be. Claire loads the speakers into the truck.

They spread out at the top of a small hill. Claire grew up in Pontiac; not mountainous and not a big city, but not the bare plains, either. Hunting west of her hometown has made her used to these vast, flat expanses, but she still forgets how much land there is, if you only think to look for it.

As Jody hands her a sandwich, she somehow aches for the empty space in the back seat, for the extra sandwich that wasn’t packed. Kaia wasn’t with them for a long time; Claire barely knew her, really. And yet— and yet, she’d felt something, a pull she hadn’t ever felt before, a power in her bones that could only be compared to Castiel’s grace in her veins, but better in every way. Better because it was somehow more of a choice than her offer to Castiel, for all that her — her crush, that’s what it must have been — seemed to sweep her along without her say.

Patience plugs her phone into the speakers, and plays something Claire doesn’t recognize. She is outside, in the sun, hearing something new. Kaia lingers in her mind, in her body, like the most welcome kind of spirit, but the light holds grief at bay. Claire wasn’t ready for it two weeks ago, but now, now she can take it. There’s enough of her left to stand even with the grief swept away.


End file.
